Computer systems comprising at least one server computer are widely known. By way of example, what are known as blade server systems are known, in which a plurality of what are known as server blades can be plugged into a midplane of a shared chassis of the blade server system. In that case, the server blades provide computation power to execute applications. Further infrastructure components, particularly power supply units and network components, are normally inserted into the chassis from a rear end and provide operating voltage and interface functionalities for the plugged-in server blades. Furthermore, such blade server systems normally comprise what is known as a management blade, which is used inter alia to manage the server blades that have been plugged into the chassis.
To allow particularly simple and flexible association of different application programs for different server blades, it is likewise known to perform what is known as virtualization of server profiles. Virtualization of the server profiles abstracts the applications executed by the individual server blades from the actual hardware used for execution. In particular, individual server blades can be assigned virtual network identifiers used to identify the server blades instead of the physical network identifiers stored in the network components. This allows a particular application to be executed on any server blade, with the application always having the impression that it is running on the same server with the same network identifier.
In that case, the virtual network identifiers are provided by the management blade of the blade chassis when the individual server blades are actually started. By way of example, the network identifiers can be retrieved directly by the individual server blades from a nonvolatile memory of the management blade via a memory interface.
One problem of that approach is that it is unsuitable for use in heterogeneous environments. Particularly in the case of computer systems in which the server computers are not managed via a shared management blade, it is impossible to insure unique assignment of virtual addresses. Manual assignment of virtual addresses is error-prone and could therefore result in duplicate assignment of the same virtual address. The repeated use of the same virtual address can result in severe exceptional states, however, since two physical servers use the same logical address in this case and therefore disturb one another.
It could therefore be helpful to provide improved systems and apparatuses and also methods for operation thereof that allow safe and flexible association of network identifiers.